To the end of this line add noapic acpi=off
Press Ctrl-X to exit and Y to save.
Type sudo update-grub

That's
it. Now your bootloader options are set properly in the menu.lst
file. If you reboot, it should boot straight to a login prompt with no magic required.

Magic!

You might be asking "Why on earth would I want to run an 8 year old unmaintained operating system?" I have a customer question regarding Samba 3.0 and AD interoperability. This VM gets me to the right Samba era to test my assumptions. Viola!